Returning 'Home'

It is hard to move to live in another country, surrounded by strangers, with different customs (although, we all seem to enjoy the challenge and the adventure). How hard is it, though, to return to one’s own country again? Perhaps age, or family concerns, or illness, or the death of one’s lifetime companion will be the leading reason why someone must return. How do they manage, once they are back? It is said that after ten years away from your country, you have moved a decade in one direction, while your old home has moved a decade in another.

Is there any help or advice back in the UK, or Germany or Holland for the weary son who returns to the homeland? Will they ‘kill the fatted calf’?

Probably not. It must indeed be very lonesome and sad to be in such a position. It is not unheard of for the ex-expatriate to ask for his ashes to be returned to Spain on his death.

Another group that must face – doubtlessly more often – the return to their country of birth is the Spanish, often studying or working abroad. They may come back to Spain, perhaps, and feel uneasy. They have adopted different customs and life-styles. They had found new companions abroad and now feel that their ‘stay-at-home’ friends no longer understand them. Codigo Nuevo has a report on this subject titled ‘Deciding to return to your country after having migrated is almost as hard as leaving’. It’s sometimes hard to leave; perhaps it is usually far harder still to return.

The Rise and Fall of Podemos

Perhaps Podemos should have a close look at itself. It is losing support and has fallen into fourth place. Its message may be as important as ever, but, as with all far-left parties, there are too many tendencies pulling in various directions. Not helping this, the leader of the party, Pablo Iglesias, tends towards an autocratic control of the group, with the consequent loss of some of his associates.

Iglesias is a clever man, and has some good ideas, but he is not strong on self-criticism (an exception following his poor results in Catalonia has been posted heavily in the media). Indeed, there are few newspapers or other sources which have much to say for Podemos either by itself or in coalition with the Izquierda Unida as Unidos Podemos, and, apart from El Diario and Público (both cyber-news sites) the corporate media is uniformly hostile.

Podemos shot to fame a few years back, but maybe their star is burning out. Certainly a president with a pony-tail may be a step too far to imagine.

It’s also true that the voters can be fickle and, as this video shows, quite foolish. Podemos also makes for good jokes, as the fake news site El Mundo Today knows. However, within the joke (Podemos, ‘We Can’, to change its name to ‘We Want’), a kernel grows: the group is indeed considering changing its name as part of a change in image (maybe you should consider cutting off that coleta, Pablo!).

I Didn't Make It Mama

Amidst all the (endless) doggy stories on Facebook, along came a post about a far larger tragedy that's happening right here on our doorstep. I felt it was worth the translation.

I didn't make it, Mama.
But don't tell my siblings, or 
say a word to Dad. 
Tell them I arrived safely 
to that place that Grandfather 
loves to speak of 
- where the tank are full of water
and the bullets are made of sugar. 
Here I have both my bread
and the money to buy more.
Tell them to keep fighting
for a better World!
Tell them I live in EUROPE,
And that my boat didn't sink along the way.

The Romería

Sunday was the romería de la Virgen de Mar, which was held around the chapel in the dunes past Retamar, Almería. The virgen was washed ashore there many hundreds of years ago, they say. The gypsies, the horse people, the devout and the curious were there, with their picnics and their children. The horsey types brought their buggies and their mules. There was a market selling toys and hats and - for some reason - a small stand from La Voz de Almería, our local paper.
The bishop of Almería was in the chapel, reading scripture and eulogizing the Virgen. Nearby, a jolly trailer advertising 'Vinos' was doing a good trade.
I ordered a Málaga Virgen to toast the Almería Virgen. It was the least I could do.

Fitur - Because We Need More Tourists.

The huge Madrid tour fair FITUR is held next week – starting on Wednesday and running through Sunday 21st.  This massive event, under the light of over eighty million foreign visitors to Spain in 2017 together with any number of Spanish holidaymakers (Catalonia, disappointingly bucking the trend following the political upheaval there), will be a temporary home to an expected 10,000 exhibitors, as 2017’s figures were ‘...9,893 exhibiting companies from 165 countries/regions, 135,858 trade participants and 107,213 people from the general public. A video from LaSexta says that there were – in the first eleven months of 2017 – 18 million Britons, 11.4 million Germans and 10.7 million French visitors (no wonder they forget about us foreign residents). Does Spain (with a population of 46 million souls) need more tourists – or merely more income from tourism? 

Meanwhile, Mojácar is going to be there as it is every year.  I've been a couple of times in years gone by - when the politics of our town allowed - and it's a massive show indeed. Countries with exhibitions, dancers and free drinks (try Peru for its Pisco Sours if you have the chance). Flamenco guitarists and people with whistles, didgeridoos and nose-flutes. All very jolly. Even Gibraltar has a small and slightly embarrassed presence there. Mojácar for a while had its own stand, which cost a fortune, but - gracious - look at our tourist figures today! We must keep those souvenir shops a-trembling. 

One of our best ideas was to give Indalos de Oro - Golden Indalos - to those who have done much to bring tourism to our fair town. These have, naturally, gone mainly to Spanish entrepreneurs or (in the current trend) to Belgian cyclists, Bless 'em. Indeed, some of our galardonados have been useful to our tourism, others less so. We remember the man who owns and closed the Moresco hotel in the pueblo Arturo Fernández as one, the PP politician Rafael Hernando as another. Singer Miguel Ríos (a regular visitor) as another.

After a prolonged campaign on Facebook - the Tourist Department even relented and gave one to Bob Jones - a local British resident who sent many beautiful pictures of our town over the years to the weather forecast on the national TV, who in turn featured them in their program.  

Last year, they faltered slightly and gave the two prizes to the children of Jacinto Alarcón (the mayor who revitalised Mojácar in the sixties). This year - no one, so far, is saying.

Later: On Wednesday, the first day of FITUR, the Tourist Office relented and produced this notice:  '...This year, having reached in the last edition of FITUR the 25th anniversary of Los Indalos de Oro de Mojácar, the delivery of the traditional Golden Indalos is transferred to the municipality itself, celebrating a feast of the Indalos de Oro that will take place in the town, on a date yet to be specified.
The aim of this initiative is to ensure that all residents and neighbours can enjoy an important event for the locality, while at the same time making it easier for relatives and friends of the prizewinners to share such a special moment...'. Stupid, or what?
So, the whole Indalo de Oro thing has been washed up through a complete lack of imagination.

 

Ten Years Too Long

Helen and Len Prior have now been without a house for ten years as theirs was demolished in a pointless exercise by the Junta de Andalucía on 8 January 2008. Since then, they have lived in their garage which had another licence and thus escaped the atrocity. The house was in a quiet area outside Vera (Almería). There are other – unscathed – houses nearby, and the zone is neither on the beach, nor in a flood plain, nor on the motorway, a river or in a national park.  As Almería Hoy reports, the Priors were advised by their lawyer to sue the local town hall and, after a lengthy period, the Priors have decided reluctantly to accept a compensation of a third of the amount they had claimed (following a successful appeal from the ayuntamiento). Bad for the Priors, of course, but as the article says – terrible for Spain’s reputation abroad.   

In a statement to Business over Tapas, Mrs Prior says ‘Len and I will not be celebrating our ten years of purgatory.  We are hoping to be paid by the end of February/March and just turn our backs on it all.  It is only one third of the money we requested and thought we were entitled to, but to be honest, we thought the powers that be were hoping for us to die without being paid at all. So living this long has to be a result...’.

Plastic Farms Need Plastic Farmers

According to La Voz de Almería, our plastic farms generate one million kilos of plastic waste each year. The plastic used to keep the hot moist atmosphere within and the burning sun and dry winds without perishes after a couple of years use. A company called Cicloagro has the concession to collect and recycle. How well they do it...?
Anyhow, in the same article, we are told that there are 30,000 hectares (300 square kilometres) of plastic farms in the province - the unsightly 'invernaderos' of western Almería.
I asked a farmer about this - 'Weren't there meant to be 30,000 hectares of invernaderos around twenty years ago - I keep seeing new ones springing up'.
According to him - and he's a member of the fruit-growers association CASI - there is now more than double the oft-reported figure, at 70,000 hectares - seven hundred square kilometres of plastic farms - stretched from Adra to Nijar.
One of the new problems for this important agricultural industry is that the Chinese - who used to import all the used plastic - have now stopped doing so. So Cicloagro, who's concession comes up soon, says they are not particularly interested in renegotiating another five years worth.
So, what will happen to the plastic?
Well, as the town hall in El Ejido has suggested, they could ask the Ministry of the Environment to come and lug it all off somewhere.
Just please, Fellows, don't chuck it all in the sea!

Early Remarks on Catalonia

The Catalonian results are in. As we wait to see what government - if any - can be formed. Here are a few early impressions.
As readers must know, there were seven essential candidatures. Three from the Independents, three from the 'Constitutionalists', and Podemos in the middle, slightly unsure of its place.
The largest vote went to a Constitutionalist party - the Ciudadanos Party of Inés Arramides - with 37 seats. Second and third place went to the exiled Carles Puigdemont (it's hard to campaign when you are in another country) with  34 seats for his JxCat and the imprisoned-in-Madrid Oriol Junqueras - ERC (it's even harder to campaign when you are in a jail cell. Indeed, he has had his 'privileges' removed for sending out a political message to his wife over the phone). The ERC pulled 32 seats.
Fourth went to the PSOE candidate, who works under the PSC name with 17. Fifth went to Podemos with eight seats..
Sixth and seventh went to the two smallest parties, who, on collecting less than five seats must work from the 'Grupo Mixto' bench: the unaligned. These uneasy bedmates are the radical anarchist independent republicans CUP with four seats and the, er, slightly to the right Partido Popular (pictured), champion of the still-in-effect Articulo 155, with a 'disappointing' three seats. An 'absolute majority' is 68 seats. Between the three independents - uneasy bedmates indeed - there are seventy.
As things are decided - hopefully Junqueras and Puigdemont have lieutenants who can speak for them - we turn to Madrid, where the batacazo of the Partido Popular in the Catalonian elections has done Rajoy no favours at all.

We Love You

A cute advert from the region of Castilla-La Mancha - the area south of Madrid that's made up of the five provinces of Albacete, Ciudad Real, Cuenca, Guadalajara and Toledo. Famous, perhaps, for Don Quijote and El Greco. Maybe a few other things. Buy me a drink and I'll tell you.
But, what a campaign,  hey? We love you. We jus' wanna grab you and hug you and never never let you go. It's not about your pocket book, your cash or your Visa card. No, it's YOU we love and... (continue until fade out).

So Many: Too Many? Can You Squeeze in Another, Guv?

How many tourists can you fit on the head of a pin? The Ministry of Tourism would like to know.
Coming up in January is Spain's tourist fair, the FITUR, held in Madrid. I've been there half a dozen times over the years and, as the Reader can imagine, it's an enormous trade-fair which stretches through a number of pavilions. Most countries are represented there, as are all of Spain's autonomous regions, tourist areas, cities, resorts and hotel groups. Marbella... Costa Brava... PortAdventura... 
Even Gibraltar has a stand there.
For some years, Mojácar did too.
Like any trade fair, FITUR is all about finding new business; which, when it comes to tourism, means more tourists.
Spain makes a lot of money from tourism, which it needs to help balance the books. This year, around eighty million foreign visitors will have experienced Spain, all leaving behind a quantity of money, while taking home with them little more than a hangover and a sunburn.
Now that's a good deal for Spain.
Furthermore, the Spanish themselves are no slouches when it comes to taking a holiday in Andalucía, Mallorca or the Costa Brava. In the summer season, a number of cities - Granada, Seville and Córdoba for example, - are filled to the brim (much to the joy of the hoteliers and the souvenir shop-owners). New tourist routes are being opened up - the Chinese in particular are beginning to arrive, and they like museums and historical sites. 
And souvenir shops.

Barcelona now has so many foreigners that the dreaded word 'turismofobia' has been coined (sic) to describe the reaction by the local residents.
But, who cares. Spain is making money. At least, until there's a terrorist attack, a political upheaval, an earthquake, a cholera outbreak, or the Italians suddenly (and unexpectedly) lower their prices.
But now the authorities themselves are waking up to 'tourist saturation'. It finally occurred to someone that it's not the amount of visitors you want, it's how much you can wring from their pockets. In short: You have parking for a hundred cars. Which is better for business: Seats or BMWs?
So, says the WTTC - the World Travel and Tourism Council - what to do? First, try and spread the visits across the year: make the season longer. School holidays should be spread out maybe? They don't say. Secondly - try and persuade the visitors to go to less attractive spots. Two weeks in Teruel anyone? The third suggestion (we hope somebody is getting paid for this) is to adjust prices upwards to better reflect supply and demand (Dominican Republic, here we come). Fourth is 'control the lodgings available'. This of course is an idea favoured by the hoteliers and consists of closing down all other lodgings, Airbnb and the guest suite upstairs. The fifth and final suggestion is to 'limit or curtail certain activities'.
What, like drinking and sunbathing?

Circulation Figures

There are essentially two auditors of the Spanish media - the OJD which measures how many copies are printed, and the slightly larger, but perhaps less believable, EGM, which says how many people read them (or see or listen to them in the case of broadcasters). The OJD is older, similar to the British ABC.
The EGM sometimes appears to be quite generous with the numbers - with twelve people, for example, reading each and every copy of our local daily newspaper. Perhaps that includes Internet visitors (who rarely read an entire newspaper on the screen).
I once owned a 'free' newspaper with three editions (The Entertainer), rather before these things were popular. We were printing 40,000 copies for a while there, although the OJD rather unkindly audited us at a disappointing 39,950. They then wanted to triple their price because it was, you know, three editions. With the unsurprising result that...
OJD exits left, followed by bear.
Printing papers these days is quite expensive. Let us say, as a nice round figure (variables include colour, pagination and of course volume), one euro a copy. Distribution is extra - getting them to the corner newspaper kiosk (or, in the case of the freebies, to the corner bar or shop). Distribution for the ordinary press is a bit cheaper per unit, because the costs are shared, although it remains disturbingly high (see the figures here). A large agency like Boyacá picks them up and takes them fast to the sales points - essentially for all of the competing titles. 
In the case of the freebies, it's each one for himself (although the EWNMG has now acquired a couple of its erstwhile competitors which must lower their unit distribution costs).
There are, of course, many other costs typical to any business: premises, staff, transport, social security and bird-food for the parrot.
However, the printing costs are higher these days than ever, and - for the regular newspapers - readership is down. Profit, if there is to be any, must come from the advertisers. This, as we have seen elsewhere (BoTs passim) leads to manipulation of the news items, especially when the juicy institutional advertising accounts are signed. Even so, some of the major Spanish dailies (including the ABC, El País and La Vanguardia) are now talking of reducing their editions to just two or three a week in 2018.
The weekly free newspapers, particularly (and of course!) the foreign-owned foreign-language freebies, get no institutional advertising at all. They also (in  my experience) get no, or very little, Spanish agency advertising. You can search all day without finding any adverts for Volkswagens, Parador hotels, Nesquik, toothpaste or cough medicines. Perhaps to save the agency the bother of a second advert in another language, perhaps to keep them focused on the traditional high-volume kick-back paid by their larger customers, known as un rápel, and perhaps because it's 'all in the family', which doesn't include furriners (sorry).
While a normal newspaper goes to the kiosk, and a free publication can be easily put into the letterbox, in the case of foreign-language free-sheets we must ask the reader to pick up a copy, which means there must be something to read. Costs again go up.
So what do they live on? Local advertisers, usually foreigners. Which brings us back to where we started: the circulation figures. I looked at the EWN's slightly alarming Media Pack (which begins with a Donald Trump quote) and found a claim of 'more than half a million copies per month' (a month has, I guess, 4.3 weeks in it) and a readership of  'more than half a million readers per week'. I wrote the other day and asked them for some audited figures, but haven't heard anything from them so far. At a presumed 120,000 copies per week (six editions), they have a higher print run than the 99,000 daily sales figure reported for El País!
Newspapers, free ones and paid for ones, have all fallen for the charms of the Internet. The thing is - it's almost free. You just pay the writers (and, in the certain cases, the lay-out artists), and you wait for your readers to show up. Some Spanish dailies, like El Diario and El Español, only exist as cyber-news.
Then there are the bloggers, who (like Spanish Shilling) apparently do their thing for free!
The readers, of course, are going to be visiting more than just one site (one newspaper), receiving a plurality of differently-shaded news. They probably won't dwell on the advertisers any more than they do reading a newspaper. After all, with the TV or radio, you are forced to sit through an advert: with a newspaper, you simply turn the page.
With the subscription news-service Business over Tapas (here) - there's no adverts to be leery of (although...).

Market Day

The Sunday market just outside El Alquilán (the town near the Almería airport) is massive. It starts on a roundabout - things in Andalucía are often informal - and reaches up a roadway for a kilometre or more. There's a roast chicken stand at the bottom, together with a chocolate and churro waggon and a number of tables, and then the market begins. The first half a kilometre is for clothes - cheap shoes, bras, tee shirts, jackets, children's outfits, hats, sweaters and scarves. The stalls are on each side. 'Cheap, cheap, how do we do it?' calls one toothless old chap. 'Buy them now, these prices can't last', shouts a scrawny-looking woman. The market-people are Arabs, Spaniards, Gypsies, Africans, Orientals and many others. The walkway is crowded. There are thousands of people looking for a bargain. Some are returning from further up the market, where the cheese, fruit, olives and ornamental plants are sold. Among the crowds, a number of manteros - Africans without papers -  hover over a sheet covered in shoes or CDs, watching for the brightly-uniformed municipal cop, whose job is either to fine them, or more likely frighten them away. The Africans will pick up their sheet by the four corners and be off, as the cop comes within about fifty metres of them. They head out and around, setting up once again just behind him.
We buy a few clothes and take some surreptitious pictures. The market is like something from Latin America. 'Watch your pockets', I'm told redundantly. 
Outside and heading towards where we left our vehicle, a man catches up with us - 'look at my jackets', he says, opening the boot of his nearby car. 'Genuine leather, just the thing for you', he looks meaningfully at me.
What a salesman.

Adra (because it's there)

Over the years, I have visited many parts of Spain. I've studied in Seville, lived in Madrid, spent long hospital time with my poor wife in Pamplona and run offices in Altea, Benhavís, San Pedro and Fuengirola (the old newspaper I had called 'The Entertainer' - from 1985 to 1999). Plus an office or two in  Mojácar, where I normally live. I know the province of Almería pretty well, with time spent in the capital and trips to various towns and villages over the past fifty years.
But, I'd never been to Adra.
This hardly makes me unique. No one has ever been to Adra.
Adra, at 25,000 inhabitants, is the large fishing port that signals the end of Almería heading west into Granada and Málaga. In the old days, it was a turn-off from another switch-back curve on the ghastly road between Málaga and Almería (there were 1,060 of those horrible switch-backs, as the old N340 curved and wiggled through the sharp hills), but now the fishing town is close to the bright new motorway. There is still little inclination to visit the place, which, as I finally discovered this weekend, is a shame.
According to Wiki (we couldn't find a tourist office), Adra is the fourth oldest town in Spain, founded in 1520BC. Let see... flattened by an earthquake in 881, yadda yadda, it had the first steam engine in Spain and is a big fishing port...
Yep, the man from the Wiki hasn't visited there either.
So, in the spirit of 'because it's there'. I went with my girlfriend to give the car a good growl, see the sights, buy a 'He who is tired of Adra is tired of Life' bumper sticker, and hopefully enjoy a good fishy lunch. The road swings you in, through and out in a confusing swirl, but then, as your heart sinks and you wonder whether the next town down, Motril, might is open, the planners relent and bring you back down to the harbour.
Last Sunday there was, by chance,  a flea market. We walked around, admiring a stand selling Franco memorabilia, and eventually, while looking for a bullfight poster for a friend, we bought a couple of naïf pictures from another dealer.
Adra looks like a place which is worth getting to know, or maybe a great place to hide, as nobody would ever think of looking for you there. It's probably chock-full of museums and interesting relics and buildings, plus a few wanted counterfeiters and smugglers (the murderers prefer Marbella, obviously), but we were there for a beer and a fish-head.
My companion didn't want to eat in the Club Náutico (you can never go wrong in a Club Náutico) so we walked past some dowdy looking places, including a 'American/Italian' joint, before alighting on Taberna La Granja, a splendid and atmospheric bar/restaurant in a back street. We ate a satisfyingly expensive lunch there and returned to the car.
La Granja - and you are on your own here - has a great Tarta de Whisky. The owner pours half a bottle of scotch over it to make sure that it meets with the diner's approval.
Worked for me, although I may have got a ticket driving home...

Independent Almería Towns

In the last hundred years or so, a number of Almerian towns and villages have become independent from their larger neighbour. In all, about fifteen, including El Ejido (now with a population of 89,000), Garrucha and La Mojonera. Indeed, until 1981, El Ejido was just a district of next-door Dalías.
The latest to gain independence, only last year, was Balanegra, when it departed from Berja.
There are now 103 municipalities in the province, including the newer ones of Roquetas de Mar, Pulpí, Carboneras and Los Gallardos.
Which one will be next: Mojácar Playa perhaps?
Perhaps even more peculiar is the story of Huercal Overa, which until 1668 used to belong to Lorca, in the province of Murcia.

Almería Hoy has more here.